All posts tagged "books"

First, on the one hand I was sorry to bail very early from the after-party. Had I thought it through properly, I would have stayed another night in Wellington and enjoyed it. On the other hand, after two days of things to think about, some quiet time for mental digestion would have been welcome.

Jo McLeod asked me what I thought of my first Webstock. I decided, to use a cliched metaphor, that it was a smorgasbord. Not everything was for me, there was a pleasant variety, and some things I really liked and wanted more of even as others derided them as terrible. Some things that were genuinely nourishing (according to my own crazy nutritional theories, I only eat unprocessed food you know) and others that were confection, delicious if possibly harmful. Furthermore, had the selection been up to me, likely I would not have been able to compose one with such wide appeal. Although I now realise that there is a better metaphor than smorgasbord: the fixed menu. Things come out in sequence, there is no choice other than skipping, neither can you load up on what you truly like, though you can make a note to obtain more at a later time.

Sha Hwang stood out as someone who eschewed the peppy tone of many other speakers in favour of a slow, reflective delivery with many pauses. Whether this was great for letting things sink in, or a huge irritation, depends on who you talk to. But anyway, if you were there, and you dug the theme of working to build a paradoxical something that both frees and imprisons, I have a book recommendation. China Mieville's Iron Council is a work of fantastic fiction in which the builders of a railroad revolt, build their own road, and then ultimately... I must stop there.

A few other books leaped into my mind at various points through Webstock. Cialdini's Persuasion, Kahnemann's Thinking Fast and Slow, and the better self-help books: I swear 7 Habits has gone from being a thing people have read to being composted into the culture.

Many of the talks shared a theme of personal improvement, reflection or cultivation. Some of the strongest talks, like Hwang's, touched on themes of alienation from work and the fear of building something which turns out to be an enabler for evil forces. But all these talks, if they had a call for action, limited it to the purely personal. Do better. Be better. This is where Webstock left me most. Friends, you had a few good chuckles when Marx's image appeared in a slide, yet you sighed in sympathy when one person after another complained about alienation of their labour. You might feel that Hwang's System can be tamed and reformed, or perhaps you nurture hopes of replacing it with something better, but either way collective action is the best and most likely way achieve anything. It does help a collective when the members are cultivated and capable, but no individual who limits themselves to individual work is likely to change the world we work in. I think only Andy Baio's indiepocalypse hinted at the possibilities of something else, an anarchist dream of small-scale operators working together. Webstock may have opened with the acknowledgement that we need to BURN SHIT DOWN, but it closed with inward reflection on the value of being a hard-working artisan. If it were up to me, someone at some point would have said "ORGANISE".

I can see why the kaupapa of Webstock has these borders. Webstock must be funded, must have broad appeal, cannot do more than gently nip the hands that feed it. It isn't there to represent my values and beliefs and ideology, but design-loving technocrats like me and most of my readers. I just urge you, if you were one of those with SO MANY FEELS, to take the next step and be a joiner.

The Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung is a distinguished if conservative paper, and their arts column recently featured an article which I translate below. It's rough, and I'm not a native speaker, and a little rusty, but I think this might provoke some people to do their own research at least.

Imagine a country where they speak a language which hasn't been written down since its emergence. So first you have to find a way to write it, so you can publish books in this language, which has also only just happened in a few cases in the last maybe 10 years. A language which hasn't been translated into a single book in German. A language which even in its own country can only be read by less than 5% of the population (and written by even fewer; there are no accurate figures on this). In the best case the total number of readers of this language is about 200 000 people. The country in question is the guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the year 2012. It's called New Zealand. And the language is Maori.

Now one might object that the language of the indigenous people is in fact one of two languages of New Zealand, of which the other is English, and that the New Zealand literature which we are familiar with in this country -- Catherine (sic) Mansfield of course, Janet Frame, perhaps also Frank Sargeson or Patricia Grace -- was composed in English and has long been translated. But Jürgen Boos, the director of the Frankfurt Book Fair, in conversation with this newspaper left no doubt that New Zealand's guest appearance was about one thing above all: "It's the Maori culture which is being presented to us. I've just come to understand in the last few months that it's not lip service, the cultures overlap." So the absence of books from the book fair does not frighten.

Narrative media

Indeed it's probably a reaction to the big transformation the German book trade is undergoing, if Boos at yesterday's press conference for the guest of honour New Zealand highlighted the "transmedial [multimedia? dunno, not in my dictionaries] story telling" in Maori culture and therefore also promised a "transmedial mass performance" for October. In fact, the Maori have a rich narrative tradition, which isn't just transmitted orally but also through carving, textile art, tattoo, dance and painting. But which of these is appropriate for the fair itself, outside the guest of honour pavilion, which traditionally offers a multimedia presentation of the current country? The book fair boss cites workshops and exhibits, and above all films: "it's probably generally simpler to arouse interest in an author through film. That's a huge theme here at the book conference."

One can see that. Three costumed midgets stand at the entrance to the new house of books at Frankfurt -- a foretaste of Peter Jackson's pending Tolkien film "The Hobbit", the first part of which is supposed to break all movie records at the end of this year and gives a welcome reason to put on hobbit cosplay. Earlier editions of such costume competitions were at times the public exhibits that won the most participants at the fair. And for New Zealand, its reputation as a fantasy location is at least as important as the Sagas are for Iceland, which last year put on a universally praised guest country entry in Frankfurt. New Zealand has to measure up to that -- but apparently not literarily.

At that, Kevin Chapman, the head of the New Zealand publishers assocation can proudly announce that sixty authors -- obviously mostly English-speaking -- will come to Frankfurt and by the fair up to 100 books from his country -- obviously in English -- will be newly translated. Up until now it was only around ten a year. Nonetheless, it's a vanishingly small number in comparison to other guest countries.

It shows the lack of daring on the German side that a wonderful novel like "Gifted" by Patrick Evans has found no German publisher, although since its appearance in 2010 in New Zealand it has been celebrated for its subtle depiction of the legendary cohabitation of the two authors Frank Sargeson and Janet Frame in the years 1956/57. But then Evans isn't first on the travel list for Frankfurt at all. By contrast Alan Duff was just recently a New Zealand author on an official junket in Germany, uniting the advantages of having Maori descent and having written the book that led to the film "Once Were Warriors."

It hinges on food and drink
Many of the hundred hoped-for new translations will be travel and cook books. That's wholly in keeping with the New Zealand government's intentions. The speech given by Lisa Futschek, the acting ambassador in Germany, gave a foretaste: no word about literature, everything revolved around food and drink in New Zealand. Even for Jürgen Boos this was too transmedial, especially since Ms Futschek didn't once offer the obligatory Maori greetings, which otherwise were compulsory at this exhibition.

We by contrast will learn some broken Maori this autumn at the book fair, that's for sure. But whether the guest country's programme will succeed in transmitting the seriousness of its cultural concerns beyond the allure of the exotic? We have certainly become more open to new forms of narrative in recent years. But at a book fair, it's the books that count.

I have now finished Platonov's The Foundation Pit. It left me with a sense of dull hurt. It was a book whose language was plain but whose meaning was obscure. Summary: a cold allegory of the revolution eating itself, recursively encoded in the setting of the post-revolutionary society, in strange, affect-less language. Oddly I was reminded strongly of Russell Hoban's early work. Hoban favours a syntactically simple English with odd neologisms and turns of phrase that suggest another language, and the Russian-inflected translatese combined with nightmare socialism produced a similar effect for me. In trying to understand what was going on, I stumbled on this review, in which the translator of my edition shows up in the comments section to give a strong justification of his choices.

I am putting off getting back to Berlin Alexanderplatz, partly because I'm feeling lazy and German is hard work, and partly because I've read a lot of German recently and can't face more for a bit. I can't explain therefore why I picked up Günter Grass' autobiographical Peeling the Onion (in translation), except that I decided it was time that I gave him the courtesy of hearing his story myself before I passed judgment again -- I was not disposed to be charitable when the revelation he had served in the Waffen SS came out, even if it was as a teenage conscript. (Excerpt). How could he have kept this quiet so long?

Grass' own predicament, namely carving out a career as a post-war voice of conscience while hiding his own contribution to the past he excoriated, is exactly the kind of thing that might have figured in his novels and indeed now I feel the need to re-read them in this light, and also not to re-read them on account of how he let his readers down for so long. Currently feeling a bit more sympathetic towards him morally, but I really hate the way every part-recollection is dressed up as a question. Did I eat my fill of cold beef this evening? Could I have cut a little more meat? Or did I perhaps merely think it might have been nice? This stylistic tic is driving me nuts. If everything he apparently couldn't remember in much detail were stripped out, it would be a much shorter book.

Nothing in particular to say about this big Israeli spies in Christchurch flap thing. I have spatteredvariousthoughts around the internet, and I do plan on summarising them, but not for a few days in case more facts come out. Likewise, I will wait a bit for a followup to the antisemitism post. There is some possible overlap there but again, best to let it settle down.

Last night I finished Elif Batuman's The Possessed. I hope I never meet Elif Batuman in person, because I have formed such a positive impression of her from her droll prose that no one could really live up to my expectations. (On the other hand, every account I've ever heard of meeting Terry Pratchett in person confirms that he is just the sane, generous and humane person you might expect. Hmmm.)

The book is essentially a collection of autobiographical stories, each one mixed with reflections on Russian literature. Batuman is fond of zingers. Sometimes I couldn't help reading the best bits aloud to Kathy.

The novels I have on the go right now are Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz, which I have wanted to read for a long time, and Platonov's The Foundation Pit.

Berlin Alexanderplatz is slow going. I'm reading it in German, and there's a lot of street talk, Berlin dialect, heavy Polish accents and Yiddish in it, which means that even with a top notch dictionary, I have to infer a lot of things from context and maybe ask one of my German speaking colleagues about them the next day. There's no guarantee even that they can help though -- the language is the street talk of Weimar Republic Berlin, 80 years old and potentially opaque to anyone who's not a student of it. I'm enjoying the book a lot though. It has the same playful modernism that I really liked in Flann O'Brien, with snippets of official pamphlets and tram timetables and first person passages that reveal things about the speaker that they aren't aware of.

The Foundation Pit is something I ordered a few weeks ago on the strength of this post at Language Hat. (Yes, I read Language Hat's every post. You should too.) Platonov's language is astoundingly brutal, matching the matter at hand. It is the language of politics and the Party. It makes me wonder what it would be like to take the words and phrases used by our own political and managerial class, and the marketing that supports them, and write a novel in that language, and whether it would sound as inhumane.

So in my head I'm spending a lot of time in 1930s Europe.

Funnily enough, or maybe not, I got an email from a year 13 student last week. She asked for assistance with a history project, in particular whether I had pointers to resources that might answer the following questions:

1) What is holocaust denial?

2) To what extent does The Hayward Thesis and The Kupka Doctorate show Anti-semitic feelings in New Zealand?

3) To what extent is New Zealand an anti-semitic society now?

I have already replied pointing her at Deborah Lipstadt's work, and at the Nizkor project, which answers question 1, but I am brooding over the other two. I'm not really sure either how to answer those questions myself or where answers might be found elsewhere. So I am working on something extended, which I hope to post here in due course.

We drove up State Highway 2 for a look around and on a whim, took a short detour from Carterton to see Stonehenge Aotearoa. It's a delight. It's not a mere Stonehenge replica, but has many novel features designed for our local geography (eg, a stone placed to mark wherethe Pleiades should be at Matariki) and has a thoroughly astronomical underpinning. Although they do let the Druids and the Wiccans go for it at solstices and equinoxes, apparently.

We went to the big exhibition at the City Gallery. Overall, somewhat pop art in flavour and definitely "accessible." Since I am not a deep art thinker, that's fine by me.

We caught the Devil's Tongue lily in flower at the Botanic Gardens. It really did smell like rotting meat.

Books I have bought

59 Seconds -- a rattling good read by Richard Wiseman (nominative determinism at work here?) about self-help techniques that have an empirical basis in research and actually work, contrasted with self-help mythology that everyone knows but which doesn't work. For example, visualisation of an end goal does not work. But it turns out that visualising doing the work that would lead to that goal (and not coincidentally, making the plan that would tell you what that work is) does work. I was inspired to get this by someone posting a Kim Hill interview podcast with him on Public Address System.

Is This A Man -- Primo Levi's account of his time in Auschwitz. There is no way for me to summarise this in a paragraph. I will say that it was powerfully affecting, such that although the book came in an omnibus edition with The Truce, an account of Levi's experiences immediately after the Germans abandoned the camp, I was too emotionally drained to read any further. Giovanni inspired this purchase. I actually thought I had read Is This A Man a long time ago, but I now realise that I was confabulating because there are extracts in The Drowned And The Saved, which I have read several times. Hannah read this while she was here. What effect it had on her I cannot say.

London Labour and London Poor -- Henry Mayhew's classic survey of the London wokring class. Golly, you can see where Terry Pratchett gets a lot of his Ankh-Morpork material from. I won't be surprised if there's a new Pratchett novel about people who go up sewers that flood with the tides, looking for recyclable scraps. For me, personally relevant, given that the Judd family antecedents include a large number of desperately poor Londoners of very kind Mayhew described, eg piece-working boot makers. Of note, the cheerful ignorance of religion and the heedless expenditure of all spare cash on drink. I'm part way through this.

To Mock a Mockingbird -- Raymond Smullyan. A book of logic puzzles, eventually leading in a lovely and startling exploration of combinatoric logic, where combinators are analogised to birds in a forest that respond to calls of other birds. I am part way through this. (How dull to only read one book at a time...) I found Hannah reading the first chapter, full of puzzles about knights who sometimes lie and sometimes don't and mysterious doors that may or may not have certain death behind them -- like me, she has the same response as Casanunda the dwarf

'Hang on', said Casanunda. 'I think I've worked it out. One question, right?'
'Yes', said Ponder, relieved.
'And he can ask either guard?'
'Yes'.
'Oh right. Well, in that case he goes up to the smallest guard and says, "Tell me which is the door to freedom if you don't want to see the colour of your kidneys and incidentally I'm walking through it behind you, so if you're trying for the Mr Clever Award just remember who's going through it first."'
'No, no, no!'

Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne -- Jean Améry. I learned about Améry when I read The Drowned and the Saved where Levi was careful to discuss his views in some depth, though he clearly disagreed with Améry in many ways. Améry was at Auschwitz when Primo Levi was, although there is some doubt about whether they crossed paths. I haven't started this book yet.

I suppose telling you about what I haven't finished reading is part of my strategy for making myself finish the books. Part of my plan to do this is re-engage some habits from the media fast earlier this year. (See, Wiseman is having an effect alread!) But more of that in the next post...

Last week I got a 30% off voucher from Borders, so I wandered down to see whether I could find anything I wanted. This violates my usual book buying policy, which is recherché books online, bestsellers at Borders, and browsing at Unity. But... 30% off.

I ended up with a copy of Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death.

I first encountered Postman when I acquired a copy of a lecturer's course notes while working as an IT support person at the School of Education at the University of Waikato. In those days, there were still some hardy Marxists who had survived the merger of the university's Department of Education with Hamilton Teachers' College, and I would talk with them as I fixed their computers. (For all I know they are still locking horns with their vocationally orientated colleagues, and I hope so.) Anyway, these notes contained a lengthy and fascinating excerpt from this book, which has been on my "must read someday" list ever since.

Postman's argument goes more or less like this:

different media favour different modes of discourse

print favours sequential, logical argument and dense information

electronic media, starting with the telegraph and culminating in television, favour disconnected snippets, light on information, chosen largely for emotional impact, and produced for entertainment above all else (the book predates widespread internet by more than a decade)

television as the dominant medium has a devastating effect on public discourse, as it replaces argument with entertainment

this is why politicians' policy positions have become subordinate to their ability to connect emotionally with the public on camera

There's more to it than that, of course.

Postman's account of the news show as vaudeville performance, whose reference to real events is only for the purpose of stimulating entertaining emotion, is as true now as it was when he wrote it. His description of the weakening attention span of the public -- from the book-reading, lecture-attending, Sitzfleisch of the 19th century to the channel-surfing 20 second boredom -- is damning.

At the end of the book, he suggests that there are two answers, one nonsensical, one desperate. The nonsensical one would be to start producing shows that deconstruct television, showing the audience how it manipulates their emotions and constructs argument out of nothing more that sequences of shots. He argues that such a show would have to be itself entertaining, or it could never be funded and broadcast, and that it would be funny along the lines of Monty Python and other shows that mocked television convention. "In order to command an audience large enough to make a difference, one would have to make the programs vastly amusing, in the television style. Thus the act of criticism itself would, in the end, be co-opted by television. The parodists would become celebrities..." Well, hello Jon Stewart.

The desperate answer, according to Postman, would be to add education about the workings of television to the school curriculum. I have no idea whether this has happened or not, but I think that's what the fuddy duddy complaints about media literacy in the English syllabus are about. But judging purely by, say, the content of the comments on the NZ Herald site and Stuff, it's not working.

In summary, Amusing Ourselves to Death is a depressing read.

I find it interesting to try to extend the book's message to the web-dominated milieu I live in. I've forsaken the emotional farce of "serious" television for the textual web. It's hopeful, isn't it, that densely argued text is fighting a rear-guard action against television? I don't know. LOLcats and Youtube make that a dubious position to hold.

But anyway, I've decided to extend my entertainment fast a little further. I have held out against Twitter and Facebook quite happily, but that still leaves massive gobblers of my attention: certain blogs and news sites I find myself checking multiple times a day, like Metafilter and Public Address System. I'm taking a break from them for a while too. At least until March. Maybe longer. I've been getting my willpower muscle back into shape, and now I'm going to exercise it a bit harder.

The other day I read that Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling On Happiness is a good book. So yesterday I borrowed it from the Wellington Public Library. (I nearly didn't, because I couldn't find it on the shelf, and I had to ask a librarian to help me. Apparently 158 GIL is shelved before all the 158.xxx AAAs - years of programming and university libraries that work on the Library of Congress system have given me different intuitions about natural sort order to whatever librarians do with Dewey Decimal.)

Stumbling On Happiness was indeed a very interesting book, although somewhat overwritten for my taste. I prefer my humorous non-fiction to be understated and donnish, thank you. Lots of stuff about cognitive biases, heuristic vs rational thinking, and all the things that psychologists who study happiness and behavioral economists have been looking into for the last few decades.

Anyway, the edition I borrowed was printed in the UK. So some helpful person has changed all the Moms to Mums, the chips to crisps, and so on. Fair enough, I suppose, though I found it jarring. Gilbert is an American; all his examples are American; we're all familiar with American English. Why bother, and ruin his prose style too?

But then I found this block-quoted passage from Adam Smith:

In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the motorway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.

Motorway? I know that 18th century Scotland was full of capable and clever technical people, but I'm pretty sure that when the sun shone at all, beggars sunned themselves on the (nice, warm, dirt) highway.

I googled up the passage in question. My guess was right. The same chapter contains this other marvellous passage (warning, contains casual 18th century Jew stereotypes). I think we all know people like this:

How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility? What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniencies. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other people, in order to carry a greater number. They walk about loaded with a multitude of baubles, in weight and sometimes in value not inferior to an ordinary Jew's-box, some of which may sometimes be of some little use, but all of which might at all times be very well spared, and of which the whole utility is certainly not worth the fatigue of bearing the burden.

The Wellington Public Library has a copy of Kenneth David's Home Coffee Roasting - romance and revival, which I have just read and re-read with pleasure.

It's clearly aimed at the North American reader, and things have moved on even in the few years since the book was written, but nonetheless it goes into all the detail you could want with respect to different methods of home coffee coasting and the principles involved.

However, the bit of the book that stuck in my mind was the observation that home roasting used to be the norm. It took the demands of industrialisation (no time to roast) and allure of modernity to kill it off. There is a lovely reproduction of a Futurist-style Folgers billboard with the slogan "Served on planes and trains", featuring a zooming plane and train.

For the last year or two I've been buying more books than I used to. I'm not sure why — perhaps a little collecting instinct is manifesting. About half my recent purchases have come from Amazon, since the exchange rate has been so favourable, and many of the rest from Borders, or Unity, or Dymocks. Not so many from Whitcoulls though. I just don't seem to find much there that tickles me. There may be a reason for that.

Whitcoulls is part of a giant conglomerate these days, Pacific Equity Partners, and it seems that they really just don't give a rats about books, only about their profit margins. Obviously all businesses exist to make profits, but specialised retailers have to care about the thing they specialise in. Whitcoulls is now at the point of bullying small publishers to pay for the privilege of being stocked. Read the astounding correspondence (via Boing Boing).

In Wellington and Auckland we'll have Borders, and Unity and Dymocks; Christchurch still has the excellent Scorpios. If I lived in a small town though, I think I'd be resigned to getting all my books online from Amazon or Fishpond. It doesn't seem as though there'll be much of the serendipitous pleasure I expect from a real bookshop in strolling through Whitcoulls any more.